Huaer (LAOYESHAN Huaer Club)

Name of China's national intangible cultural heritage: Huaer (LAOYESHAN Huaer Club)

Applicant: Datong Hui and Tu Autonomous County, Qinghai Province

Item No.: 51

Project No.: Ⅱ - 20

Time of publication: 2006 (the first batch)

Category: Traditional Music

Region: Qinghai Province

Type: new item

Applicant: Datong Hui and Tu Autonomous County, Qinghai Province

Protection unit: cultural center of Datong Hui and Tu Autonomous County

Introduction to Huaer (LAOYESHAN Huaer Club)

Applicant: Datong Hui and Tu Autonomous County, Qinghai Province

Huaer is a kind of folk song which is widely spread in Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia and Xinjiang. It is a kind of folk song which can only be sung outside the village. It is generally called "Yequ" (as opposed to "Jiaqu" (banquet song) and also called "juvenile". Its singing is divided into two main occasions: daily production, life and "Huaer meeting". "Huaer Festival" is a large Folk Song Festival, also known as "singing mountain".

LAOYESHAN Huaer Festival is a large-scale folk song singing activity held in LAOYESHAN, Datong Hui and Tu Autonomous County, Qinghai Province on the sixth day of the sixth lunar month. It was born in the Ming Dynasty. After hundreds of years of development, with the "chaoshanlang Festival" activity, it has gradually evolved from a large-scale folk activity focusing on entertaining gods to a large-scale folk activity focusing on entertaining people.

There are two singing forms of LAOYESHAN Huaer concert. The first is mass spontaneous singing, with tens or hundreds of people singing freely in the dense forest and flowers of Laoye Mountain on the sixth of June of the lunar calendar. The second is organized singing, which started after 1949, with fixed singing places and stages. After layers of selection, singers compete on the dance stage. LAOYESHAN Hua'er festival mainly focuses on singing "Hehuang Hua'er". The singers include Han, Hui, Tu, Tibetan and other ethnic groups. They sing Hua'er in Chinese together. This is the distinctive feature of LAOYESHAN's "Huaer" and "Huaer club" which are different from other folk songs and song clubs.

The main content of LAOYESHAN Huaer is singing about love life, and it also involves religion, folk custom, production and labor, historical stories, new people and new things. Its libretto is mainly composed of four sentences alternating with seven character (one three sentences) and eight character (two four sentences). It is specially stipulated that the end of two four sentences must be "double character" words, and the other one, three sentences and two, four sentences rhyme respectively, forming a special libretto rhythm, which is also a special case in the national Han folk songs. The language of Hua'er in Hehuang is vivid, vivid, beautiful and bright. It uses many rhetorical devices such as Fu, Bi and Xing, which is of great literary value. Datong LAOYESHAN Huaer has representative repertoire such as "Datong Ling", "Dongxia Ling" and "LAOYESHAN Ling". These tunes have unique rhythm, beautiful lyric, loud and clear, graceful and melodious, and are deeply loved by the people of all ethnic groups in Datong.